Jonathan Pryce Quotes

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.

What I try to do in a play is put a problem on stage, head-on, without evasion.

I think that I am interested in the resonance between character drama and high stakes, either situational or political or social or other kind of elevated drama, and I tend to find that those things combust.

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

I think that's what makes characters interesting - when you paint a person into a corner, and you see what they do to get out of that corner. It's what makes drama drama.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

We like drama. Even in our comedy, we like drama.

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

A lot of times with novels, you can get a really deep, engaging story, but there's not a lot happening, frankly. Those books tend to be super-literary and dense, and they require a lot of commitment, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want fast-moving action and gore and plot and excitement, you can get shorted on that.

I love a really good storyline.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

It's an intuitive exercise to do a Shakespeare play and to go through a Shakespeare play.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.